I’ve been thinking about the notion of hedging. More than in the financial sense, although that’s important. Nor in the linguistic sense, though I hear it regularly in conversation: perhaps, maybe, in some ways.
That’s fine, but I mean hedging as a frame of mind. The instinct to leave oneself an exit. It’s certainly applicable to both. But something in the word feels evasive. To hedge is to protect against loss, yes. It is also to build boundaries out of attitude.
In its most literal sense, a hedge is a cultivated row of woody plants. In either form, it’s not exactly a wall, but a growing thing requiring maintenance. It separates one field from another while still intending to belong to the landscape.
How much of modern life is driven by these cultivated boundaries? Between what we say and what we mean. Between what we want and what we are willing to risk asking for.
But people hedge because experience teaches them to. Artists learn not to believe too readily in praise. Lovers learn to protect the softest part of the heart.
There is mercy in hedging because it allows us to survive uncertainty while limiting our exposure to disappointment. In this sense, hedging can look like sophistication, though beneath it there may be dependency, or perhaps a fear of allowing the other to come close.
At some point, the pursuit of optionality becomes indistinguishable from the refusal of commitment.
Thankfully, art has a different relationship to hedging. An artist can explain, improve and doubt. But eventually the work must meet the world without its maker standing alongside it. Art requires exposure. It asks the maker to say: this is what I could make from what passed through me. It cannot be made entirely safe.
Which may explain this short piece. I have approached the hedge from respectable directions: finance, language, botany, love, art, without once saying what, or whom, I planted it around. I have merely trimmed it into an essay.
